


The Little House On The Hill

by AndroidFlats



Series: Eldritch Basement AU [1]
Category: The Binding of Isaac (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Gen, Graphic Description, Graphic Description of Disgusting Enviroment, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Past Child Abuse, no beta readers we die like idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:48:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21621724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndroidFlats/pseuds/AndroidFlats
Summary: Magdalene O. Moriah was always one who valued her alone time, but she seemed to disappear two years ago. No matter how polite a small town can be, someone will end up prying eventually.Maybe it was two years too late. Maybe it was so, so many more years later than that.
Series: Eldritch Basement AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1558318
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	The Little House On The Hill

It must’ve been a full two years since Magdalene O. Moriah brought the mail in. 

The community’s whisper-mill has always been fascinated by the reclusive woman, from her seeming lack of income, to how her perfume always had an undercurrent of something foul mixed in, to her bible-preaching ways and the fact that nobody knew just how old she was. It was as if she was part of the landscape. There was the little mining town of Amaranth, and there was Ms. Moriah, living at the end of Hawthorn Way. Sure, she was spending more and more time in her home. She jumped at shadows. Stopped coming to church, or the yearly christmas and easter brunches. But people could tell that she was there.

It just made it even more confusing when it had been two years, and the mailman officially ran out of places to put the junk mail. There were stacks four feet tall on her doorstep, to say nothing of the ever-consuming mound that used to be the mailbox. He tried to be polite. Several notes were slipped under the door, asking her to please get her mail. He knew better than to pry into her life- Once, in 1995, he noticed that there was a letter from a local christian school addressed to her, so he asked Ms. Moriah if she had any children. She refused to answer, and started screaming about “a citizen’s right to privacy”, and how “you’ll be lucky if you can get a job in this state if you keep this up”. Her ferocity that day was enough to scare the mailman out of talking to her ever again. That was surely what kept the whole town quiet, too. Even now, in August of 2019, a tiny bit of fear was bubbling up as he stood outside her door, even if it was getting pushed down by the tension that had built up in the past two years. Slipping around his careful stacks of mail, he sized the door up, trying to talk himself out of what was likely a horrible idea. Then, he tried the doorknob. 

The door swung open. 

It creaked and whined from disuse, but it opened. The mailman barely had time to be surprised over the unlocked door, before he gagged and had to stumble away from it. The air smelled like rotten food, shit, and blood. He could only get a decent view of the inside hallway from where he was sitting now, and it was not reassuring. Mold crawled from the ceiling, and there were dents and gashes in the drywall. The hallway rug was askew. An end table was turned over, lying in the remains of a vase. Flies were buzzing in the air, congregating on various stains on the wall, on the floor, everywhere. The house felt like death. 

The mailman eventually got up from the now-scattered head of mail. He turned and looked back at the street. Magdalene O. Moriah’s house was on a very out-of-the-way street, and her closest neighbor was roughly two miles away, so the only people who would end up at her house were lost drivers, and people who knew Ms. Moriah personally. If something happened here, there would be no witnesses. He considered calling the police from the safety of his mailvan, but had to dismiss it. The police were just as connected to the church- and Moriah- as the rest of the town. If someone had filed a missing person’s case, they would’ve investigated by now. They aren’t going to act on a poor smell and a lot of untouched junk mail. He was going to have to walk inside.

He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for at this point. A thick layer of dust had settled over most of the objects in the house, so it was clear nobody was living here anymore. The living room was just as filthy as the hallway, with torn papers and empty pill bottles scattered on every available surface. The only thing that looked relatively alright was the television, and even it had signs of scrubbed-out stains of... what he tries to assume is coffee, on it’s side. The dining room table was overturned, and several of the chairs looked like they’d been thrown around at some point, hard enough to require legs to be duct-taped. The bathroom was festered with spiders, and the kitchen seemed to have every pest you could think of. The mailman only looked inside the fridge to ensure there weren’t any corpses in it, and the scent was enough make bile rise up his throat. The master bedroom was easily the cleanest part of the house... Somehow, it was even more unsettling for that.

There was only one more room he could find. Before he opened the door, the mailman thought about what he might see. 

He hoped there would be something he could use to get this building condemned and leveled. 

He expected Moriah’s corpse. 

He couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation he had with her, years ago, about children. 

And he opened the door.

.

.

.

.

.

Shit.

There was shit in the room.

The scent of feces culminated here, with the substance piled in the corners and along the moulding of the wall. There was a bed, sheetless and stained with piss. A toy chest was wide open, revealing only a bouncy ball and a single wooden block. There was a ceiling light, but the bulb was cracked. The sole window in the room had bars over it. Papers littered the floor, with crude drawings on them. “Me and Mommy”. “Guppy ♡”. “I’m a sinner”. “Picnic!”. “Dad hates me”. “Mom hates me”. “Really big fly wow”. There were hundreds of scribbles like that, even drawn directly onto the floor and walls themselves. A child had lived here, once.

That thought shook him to the core. A child lived here. Lived like  _ this _ . The mailman quickly kneeled down and gathered the drawings, looking for any more information he could find. None of the drawings were signed, but he could figure there was a child, their mom, their dad, and a few cats in the family. The dad had left at some point. The cats died. The kid seemed to know nothing of the world beyond this hill, outside of what the televangelists Ms. Moriah liked said. They ate dog food and spoiled milk as their meals, and would be locked in their room. For how long, it never said exactly, but the urine and feces implied more than enough. There was a trapdoor in the center of the room, but opening it revealed a large drop and the remains of what used to be a ladder. If he jumped down, he wouldn’t be able to climb up again. Cradling the papers, the mailman rushed out, and went back to the master bedroom. He needed names, dates.

He dropped the papers onto Moriah’s bed, and started searching. The wardrobe primarily had old dresses and wigs, but in the back was a burlap sack with a few dolls and other toys in it... Likely taken as punishment, he thought. It was nothing he could use, but the sight of it was disheartening nonetheless. This house was uninhabited for at least two years. Odds are, either the child managed to run away, and doesn’t want to be reminded of the hell that must’ve gone on here... or they died. They’re probably in that basement, with Ms. Moriah herself. 

That was enough to shake him out of the panic he’d gotten into. Something horrible happened here... But whatever the details of it were, it had to be over now. No one’s life is on the line. All that can be done now is to seek justice for the poor kid. He took as deep a breath as he could risk in the disgusting household, and resumed his search for whatever he could use to give the child a proper memorial. The left nightstand was empty, save for a few dirty cups and several half-empty prescription boxes. No trapdoors hidden under the room’s rug, just cockroaches. In the right nightstand, there was a well-made bible, with golden trim shining through the dust, and... there it is. A handful of photographs, with names and dates written on the back. He grabbed the topmost one, of a cheerful toddler sitting in front of a cake.

“Baby Isaac’s first birthday - September 28, 2010”

Isaac Moriah. That was the child who lived here. It was made even more clear by the other photographs, which showed Isaac playing with his mother, and the three cats in the household. Those photos went no later than 2013. After that, the mailman could only assume Isaac’s life had gone downhill from there. But, something nagged at him. If that was Isaac’s first birthday, then he would’ve been born in 2009, right?

The mailman’s eyes caught on something metallic under the bed. There was a large, leather box, with a rusted padlock on it. He thought he might have to get someone to open it, but the padlock fell apart with only a mild tug. Placing the box near the drawings and photos he’d found already, he opened it to find... photos. More photos. Hundreds of photos, with dozens of different children in them. The dates ranged wildly, 1986, 1957, 2001, 1972, 1935. It seemed like every photo featuring a “father” featured a different man. He even found a photo from 1922, where Ms. Moriah was featured. She was a bit slimmer, and better put together, but she looked damn near identical to when he talked to her in 1995. That was a roughly seventy years difference between the two events. In fact, the only way she seemed different in all the photos was how many moles and stretch marks she had.

It took him a while to comprehend what he was looking at. What even was there to comprehend? This was reality. Humans have a lifespan of about 80-100 years. A human woman’s fertility usually drops out when they reach 50 or so. But here, these photos are saying that she had some children in the 1920s,  _ and _ she had a child in 2009,  _ and she still looks like she’s about 45 _ . How could that happen?

He tried to calm down. Maybe, maybe this was a trick. Maybe she just wanted people to think she was immortal or something.

_... Why the fuck would she want that. _

She wasn’t a prankster, she was a bible-preaching hermit of a woman, who shunned even the most commercialized of Halloween practices as “pagan witchcraft”. If she wanted people to believe she had special powers, she would call it a gift from god, and she would bring it up every church service. Not hide it in a locked box. If she earnestly believed she was immortal, then she wouldn’t be editing herself into photos to fake the appearance of it, she’d be going off on what tiny, distorted facts she believes proves she’s lived for hundreds of years.

Maybe she wasn’t the one who made these photos. But then who? Who would gain from tricking a woman like this? Some of the older photos imply that she had some money a long time ago, but for as long as he’s known, she’s never held a job while living here, and her money was definitely running low for a while...

He looked down at the photos again, taking in the array of children’s faces that looked into cameras long ago. Two questions floated up in his mind, overcoming the waves of confusion and denial rocking his brain.

Who are these children?

And how many of them ended up like Isaac?

The mailman put the photos in the box, and closed it. He carried it, and the drawings from Isaac, into his mailvan, and called one of his close friends. He needed someone else’s opinion. Something needed to be done, but he didn’t know what. Should he go to the police? The media? A private investigator? Did Magdalene O. Moriah have any relatives, and could they even help guess what was going on here? He called one of his friends, and asked them to meet him immediately.

He told him to bring a ladder, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Heya! This is sort of a prelude to a bigger series I've been chipping away at ever since I played TBOI. My updates will probably be sporadic, and there's a decent chance I'll hit a brick wall and never recover, but I'll try to make each piece feel like it could end there and not be totally disappointing, and also. Thinking about this story in my head makes me feel cozy, in ways that really aren't obvious at this point of the timeline. 
> 
> Fanfiction is nothing if not a self-serving artform, and the way I like to serve myself is with miserable children apparently.


End file.
